Award Winning Blog - Agitator

The Ideal Premium?

Ideally, no premium. Seth Godin has been promoting End Malaria the past couple of days, and here explains the case for that fundraising initiative using a book premium. He says the book is better than a tote bag. Now, I’m not a fan of premiums, period. Yes, I know they can lift response (not always), […]

Learn More September 8, 2011

Writing Wrong

OK wise guy … yes, it’s ‘writing wrongly’. But that doesn’t make for as intriguing a headline. Or so I thought. Last week, writing in Fundraising Success, Pamela Barden offered three wonderfully simple cautions regarding fundraising copy. I thought they deserved further airing now that we’re all back at our post-summer desks. Here’s what to […]

Learn More September 7, 2011

An Upsetting Request

I’m a BIG fan of Charity: Water. But then I saw this video, reporting on what they have accomplished to date and hope to achieve next. The 2011 September Campaign. Our 5-year-anniversary video from charity: water on Vimeo. The video itself is great. It tells an inspiring story about what average donors — raising money […]

Learn More September 6, 2011

More Donors Down The Drain

In what it spun as good news, the Association of Fundraising Professionals, in the latest report of its Fundraising Effectiveness Project, has released findings indicating that nonprofits lost fewer donors in 2010 than in 2009. Yeah, I guess that’s good news. But here’s the bottomline, as AFP reports it: For every $5.35 that organizations gained […]

Learn More September 2, 2011

Sorry, Hard Work Required

As The Agitator bangs away on improving donor retention, we’re mindful that success requires a key ingredient … hard work. We all know how to chuck out (more kindly, ‘dis-invest’ in) our most marginal donors, and we know how (or at least we have a plan) to cultivate those with demonstrated high value. The more […]

Learn More September 1, 2011

Do Your Donors Want To Relate?

The truth is … many do, some don’t. And of course the trick to optimizing your fundraising is knowing who does and who doesn’t. While The Agitator preaches retention, retention, retention — i.e., building durable relationships — we also note that you shouldn’t (and can’t afford to) simply throw money against all your existing donors […]

Learn More August 31, 2011